- Ireland: Police attack refinery protesters with chemical weapons
Source: Deutsche Welle [German state media]
“Police in Ireland on Saturday used pepper spray and made arrests in a bid to clear protesters blockading the country’s only oil refinery. Authorities moved in to disperse the protesters to restore supplies after five days of nationwide demonstrations over soaring fuel prices. Law enforcers, supported by armed forces personnel, moved in to reopen the Whitegate refinery in County Cork and escort fuel trucks on Saturday. … After Ireland’s Defence Forces joined the police in clearing the protests, Irish police chief Justin Kelly said on Saturday that the fuel protesters’ actions were ‘endangering the state.'” (04/12/26)
- Appeals court rules Trump’s White House ballroom construction can temporarily move forward
Source: NBC News
“A federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily allowed the construction of President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom to move forward while the administration challenges a lower court order that said the project exceeds the president’s authority. The 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel for the U.S. circuit court in Washington, D.C., means construction can continue through April 17 while the court considers the issue in more detail. A lower court judge had previously ordered the construction to cease on April 14. Trump’s lawyers have argued that the ballroom and other temporary measures are needed for ‘the safety and security’ of the president, his family and others, according to the decision.” (04/11/26)
- US House: Swalwell, Gonzales to face expulsion votes
Source: Axios
“Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) plans to force a vote to expel Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) next week over sexual assault and misconduct allegations, Axios has learned. Swalwell denies the allegations. Democrats are set to respond by moving in turn to expel Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), who’s being investigated by House Ethics over sexual misconduct allegations, two Democratic leadership aides told Axios. Swalwell has faced calls from Democratic Party leaders and House colleagues to drop his bid for California governor, though few have called for his outright resignation or expulsion from Congress. … Gonzales, who has dropped his bid for reelection, admitted to an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide, calling it a ‘lapse in judgment.'” (04/11/26)
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/11/eric-swalwell-expel-tony-gonzales-sexual-misconduct
- MN: Fraud suspect skips court, forfeits bond, throwing $11 million Medicaid case into doubt
Source: Fox News
“A man accused of orchestrating an $11 million Medicaid fraud scheme in Minnesota skipped a scheduled court appearance this week, prompting a warrant for his arrest, authorities said. Abdirashid Ismail Said, 50, failed to appear for a pretrial hearing in Hennepin County, forfeiting his bond, according FOX 9, citing the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement that his office is working with federal authorities to locate Said.” (04/11/26)
- The Real AIpocalypse Is Probably Already Here
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp“Suppose you carefully, intentionally avoid AI and its product, for whatever reason. Maybe you distrust its output. Maybe you just prefer to do your own research, and reach your own conclusions, from primary human-created sources. But how can you know AI-generated content hasn’t previously ‘polluted’ the human-created sources with ‘facts’ that aren’t true? … People have always lied, and often those lies have persisted and spread, becoming ‘common knowledge’ despite being false. AI, linked to a mechanism of near-instantaneous global spread (the Internet), can produce and distribute lies far faster than humans once did by word of mouth or through print on paper.” (04/11/26)
- Employers Are Moving Beyond Educational Pedigree. It’s Time We All Do
Source: Washington Monthly
by Ryan Stowers“I have a message for parents: A four-year degree from a top-tier university does not guarantee career success or fulfillment. College is just one path. In a world where technology is rapidly changing our jobs and hiring managers question whether college graduates have the skills needed to succeed, parents and young people should examine the range of post-high school options. Employers certainly are, and they are embracing new pathways to address the workforce gaps they have experienced over decades.” (04/10/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/10/employers-are-moving-beyond-the-college-degree/
- Every Mass Movement Needs a Devil. Socialism Always Finds One.
Source: Mindset Shifts
by Barry Brownstein“In The True Believer, a seminal book on mass movements by social philosopher Eric Hoffer, Hoffer writes: ‘Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.’ … An essential feature of socialism is to dehumanize others. Like millions in Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Mao’s China, millions of North Koreans have been taught to hate others. Millions in the ‘hostile class’ have been starved, brutalized, and murdered. Socialism will never produce a different outcome. How is it possible to insist that the next socialist regime will be different?” (04/11/26)
https://mindsetshifts.substack.com/p/every-mass-movement-needs-a-devil
- The Department of Education: Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead?
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Wendy McElroy“The continuing backlash against public schools, exemplified by the amazing rise of homeschooling, favors an easy abolition of the DOE. Nothing less than eliminating the agency will turn the tide of America’s culture war. An ideology masquerading as education aims at defining people’s thoughts and beliefs, which is the ultimate form of social control. In the foreword to his dystopian novel, Brave New World (1946 edition), Aldous Huxley commented, ‘A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.’ Public schools are both expressions of and a training ground for such an army. Ideally, all education should private, and society is moving in this direction.” (04/10/26)
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-department-of-education-ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead/
- Municipalism, Anarchism, and Polyarchy
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson“From the 19th century utopian socialists on, Henri de Saint-Simon’s concept of replacing ‘legislation over persons’ with the ‘administration of things’ has been reiterated in various forms by one thinker after another. In General Idea of the Revolution in the XIX Century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon described it as ‘dissolving the state in the social body.’ Marx and Engels referred to the same process as the state ‘withering away,’ and it clearly influenced Marx’s view of the Paris Commune as prefiguring the dictatorship of the proletariat. Since then, the same general principle has been restated by countless anarchists and libertarian socialists.” (04/10/26)
- AI and the Wiki Wars
Source: Quillette
by Russell T Warne“For years, Wikipedia has been one of the informational backbones of the internet. With over seven million articles in the English version, Wikipedia is — by far — the largest repository of human knowledge ever collected. … Wikipedia has seen many challengers to its dominance, often motivated by its perceived inadequacies. … The reason Wikipedia’s challengers have been so feeble is that none of them have offered a new model that can accomplish Wikipedia’s purpose of delivering information to its users. All the competitors function the same way as Wikipedia: as a volunteer-driven community of users who update and expand the encyclopaedia through crowdsourcing. Without any major advantages in fulfilling the basic function of an encyclopaedia, editors and readers have little reason to defect from Wikipedia (or to stay if they do). Enter Grokipedia.” (04/11/26)
https://quillette.com/2026/04/11/ai-and-the-wiki-wars-grokipedia-wikipedia-elon-musk/
- The Security Leviathan
Source: Liberal Currents
by Kathleen Frydl“Following decades of unprecedented expansion in security, detention, and surveillance, the United States government’s competence in militancy and punishment is now so dominant that it threatens to eclipse its other activities and ambitions. We are close to a point when, regardless of who is elected, the government will function like a hammer and every problem will look like a nail. As a result, at this critical juncture, opposition to the Trump administration will have to decide whether to offer a strategic vision for the direction of the American state, or cast their movement as an objection to just one person, a particular agency, or a certain issue viewed in isolation and presented as aberrational.” (04/11/26)
- America is the New Rome
Source: spiked
“The American empire is arrogant, brutal and yet completely indispensable to Western civilisation.” (04/11/26)
- Democrats and Republicans Both Want To Regulate AI. They Just Can’t Agree on How.
Source: Reason
by Jack Nicastro“As lawmakers of both major parties hustle to regulate their preferred villains, they’re losing sight of the big picture. The possible gains to humanity from AI are enormous.” (for publication 05/26)
- Where wit and wisdom disarm disinformation
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff“Even as the European Union works to bolster economic and defense support for Ukraine, the continent is confronting increasing Russian aggression on a different battlefield: the online frontier. Over the past year, the Kremlin has intensified its disinformation campaigns in an attempt to weaken Europe’s democratic pillars of truth and civic trust. As the main target of these intensified attacks, France is at the forefront of efforts to document and debunk these claims. ‘The more outspoken France has become about Russia, the more it is targeted,’ The Economist reported April 8. It documented multiple instances in which false claims on social media were launched almost immediately after French President Emmanuel Macron expressed support for Ukraine or European rearmament.” (04/10/26)
- Jury Trials Are Vital to the Constitutional Order
Source: Brownstone Institute
by David Thunder“The campaign against jury trials, one of the most free-spirited and universally lauded institutions bequeathed to us by the common law tradition, would be baffling in a healthy constitutional regime. But sadly, it is predictable enough in a regime whose political leaders have developed the habit of tinkering with civil liberties as though they were trimming their lawn.” (04/11/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/jury-trials-are-vital-to-the-constitutional-order/
- Mark Levin Seems Upset We Haven’t Nuked Iran
Source: The American Conservative
by Jack Hunter“The neoconservative talk host tried to normalize the use of nuclear weapons and now appears irate that the president hasn’t taken his advice.” (04/11/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/mark-levin-seems-upset-we-havent-nuked-iran/
- The future arrived this week.
Source: Nonzero Newsletter
by Robert Wright“This week Anthropic announced that it has a new large language model that’s way more powerful than past models — so powerful that it poses a threat to the world’s information infrastructure. This model can find otherwise unfindable vulnerabilities in software — and in fact, said Anthropic, has found previously unknown holes in every major operating system and browser. … if this model fell into the wrong hands, that could be big trouble — which is why, says Anthropic, there are no plans to release the model for the time being. Some people have wondered whether Anthropic’s claims about the terrifying power of this new model are mainly marketing hype — a suspicion that isn’t exactly discouraged by the model’s name: Mythos. But Anthropic is making Mythos available to big companies that maintain important parts of the digital infrastructure, like Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco. So if these claims were hugely exaggerated, word of that would get out …” (04/11/26)
- Why black male students are hurt the most by lowered academic expectations
Source: New York Post
by Dennis Richmond, Jr.“I’m a middle school teacher in New York, and what’s happening inside many classrooms today should concern every parent in this country, especially parents of Black boys. Education is supposed to be about reading, writing, history, discipline and accountability. Instead, in too many schools, academics are being pushed aside while politics, ideology and lowered expectations take their place. The students who can least afford to fall behind (particularly young Black boys) are the ones being hurt the most. The data shows this is not just opinion, it’s reality. According to the New York State Education Department’s 2024-2025 assessment results, proficiency rates in English and math remain far below where they should be, with major gaps between racial groups. Black students in New York City were only about 47% proficient in English and 43% proficient in math, compared with much higher rates for white and Asian students.” (04/11/26)
- Conservative women are as likely as liberal men to say words are violence
Source: Expression
by Chapin Lenthall-Cleary“I’ve previously discussed surprising results around tolerance for hypothetical controversial speakers, including the fact that male college students are substantially more tolerant — so much so, in fact, that male students are often more tolerant of their political enemies than female students are of their own allies. One might wonder whether this is true of the general population as well. Our data on the general population is less comprehensive than our student data. We don’t ask the same speaker-tolerance questions. But we do ask people whether they agree with the claim, ‘Words can be violence.'” (04/11/26)
https://expression.fire.org/p/conservative-women-are-as-likely
- Unattended Baggage, episode 336
Source: Unattended Baggage
“At this point, God is probably rooting for AI.” (04/11/26)
https://unattendedbaggage.substack.com/p/episode-336-at-this-point-god-is
- Pink Flame of Liberty, 04/11/26
Source: Pink Flame of Liberty
“The Christian Nationalists are BEEFING and they are not sending their best.” (04/11/26)
- Serious Trouble, 04/11/26
Source: Serious Trouble
“Michael Avenatti moves to a halfway house; many of Blake Lively’s claims are dismissed; aesthetic injury is a real thing.” (04/11/26)
- Minor Issues, 04/11/26
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
“Why War Is Pushing Gold Down and Oil Up.” (04/11/26)
https://mises.org/podcasts/minor-issues/why-war-pushing-gold-down-and-oil